


The Woods Are Just Trees

by FeathersMcStrange



Category: NCIS: Los Angeles
Genre: Car Accidents, Early in Canon, Gen, Minor Injuries, eric and nell centric, the analysts talk about the road not taken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 08:59:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12791190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeathersMcStrange/pseuds/FeathersMcStrange
Summary: When a car containing Sam, G, Eric, and Nell is run off the road, the two technical analysts are left to fend for themselves in the California forest until the field agents come back. With Eric concussed and Nell only barely managing not to freak out, there's only one thing to do to pass the time: discuss where they would be if they weren't here.





	The Woods Are Just Trees

**Author's Note:**

> written originally for the ncis la hiatus fic exchange in 2016, can't believe i never got around to posting it!   
> also, i probably owe an explanation over 'the art of lost causes', don't i? basically, long story short, my whole life got turned upside down for a while there and some stuff got lost in the jumble. however, things have sort of settled into a new normal for me, so i'll be actually rewriting and fixing up a lot of my old stuff, including finishing some wips - one of which is finishing dark blue verse. anyway, enjoy the fic and keep an eye out, i'll be back!

> _I used to believe in spirits, demons. I don’t know if they abandoned me or I abandoned them. (the woods are just trees and i am lost.)_
> 
> _\- A Softer World, E. Horne & J. Comeau_

From the very moment the case begins, it’s too easy. The leads are too perfect, the witnesses too cooperative, the pieces too easy to slot together. So the saying goes, about hoofbeats and horses and zebras, sometimes things just work out, but everything about this sticks in G’s mind like a particularly persistent burr. The one hitch in it all was the tech aspect. Important information had been stored in a system designed to be completely inaccessible from anywhere but on-site, which means a field trip out of ops for Eric and Nell. 

Once they actually get there it’s easy enough, the encryption falling to their combined skill set and seeing the two of them, escorted by G and Sam, on the road back to NCIS headquarters by mid-afternoon.

Eric ran out of ways to make playing ‘I Spy’ in a car driving through mile after mile of pretty much identical scenery about twenty minutes ago, and is in the middle of wondering how Nell looks like she  _ isn’t _ bored out of her mind, when she elbows him in the side.

“What?” he asks, sounding a little more wounded than a light jab in the ribs warranted.

“Does that car look familiar to you?” Nell asks quietly, jerking her chin minutely behind them at the blue four-door sedan driving a ways back down the highway. Eric can’t see anything unusual about it, and there might have been a car like that near them in the parking lot they left out of. There must be hundreds of cars that look like that in California.

“It kind of does,” he says truthfully, then adds, “It also kind of looks like my neighbor’s car, though.”

It’s at this point that Eric and Nell’s conversation and rearward focus catches the attention of their field agent escorts in the front seat.

“What’s going on?” asks G, turning around and frowning back from the passenger’s seat. 

Nell’s expression takes on a hint of doubt and sheepishness, but it disappears quickly. She trusts her instincts, and something isn’t right here. She’s sure of it. That surety is in her voice when she answers him, says, “I think someone is following us.”

Now, the attention of both G and Sam are definitely on the backseat of the car. 

“What do you mean, following us?” This time it’s Sam, taking his eyes off the road for the split second it takes him to check the rearview mirror. “For how long?”

“I think since we left the parking lot,” Nell answers, shooting another look over her shoulder at their potential shadow. A knot of tension has grown in her chest, and as she looks around at the car’s other three occupants, she can see that they are feeling much the same way as she is. 

For his part, G had been expecting this to happen since the get-go. Not this, specifically, but some sort of unforeseen hiccup that would throw them all off balance and probably put all their lives in danger. That’s just how things tended to go when everything is smooth sailing - by this point in his life, G has stopped accepting good fortune at face value, and started thinking of it essentially as the deceptive calm before the inevitable storm. Better, if you ask him, to run into trouble right away. At least then you know what you’re getting into. 

The highway they’re driving down curves, and the blue sedan disappears behind them, obscured by the treeline. When it reappears, it’s closer than it had been before, and seems to be gaining on them. Eric feels the sudden and ill-advised urge to start humming the Mission Impossible theme song. Somehow, he feels as though this would not be a gesture appreciated by the other occupants of the car, so he keeps it to himself. 

The road speeds by under the car and things are all very tense and anxiety inducing until it all abruptly goes from ‘stressful’ to ‘imminently life threatening’. Behind them, the car disappears once more behind the crest of a low hill, and when it pops back up, it’s crept up even closer, and seems to be bearing down on them more and more by the second.

“Uh, guys,” Eric says, tapping the back of the seat in front of him rapidly. “Guys!”

G is just turning around again to get a look at what’s going on when the blue sedan jams on the gas and rockets forward into the back of the car so fast nobody has any time to prepare, much less try and avoid the impact. They’re going fast enough that it barely catches them before Sam accelerates as well, but it’s enough to send them careening wildly around the road. If another car had shown up in the other lane right then, it would’ve been game over. In a fit of luck, no such car appears, but the threat still looms behind them in the form of the sedan pursuing them. 

There’s no way any of them could have seen it coming, not even Sam in the driver’s seat. So focused are they on the situation with the sedan that the sign warning about a sudden curve in the road flashes past without anyone noticing, and with one final graze of the bumper from behind, the car containing the four of them hurtles through the barrier at the side of the highway and crashes down through the forest by the road. 

Screwing his eyes shut, Eric shoots out a hand to grab Nell’s, holding to her tight and trying not to think about how he hasn’t  _ done _ enough to be ready to die.

Opening his eyes to discover he  _ hasn’t _ died is one of the more surprising things that’s happened to Eric this year. He shifts slightly in his seat, and a rush of pain shoots up from his left ankle, drawing from him a strangled yell.

“Eric? Nell?” The voice is coming from the front seat of the car, and when the spots clear from his vision, Eric sees G, twisted around in his seat with his hand on Sam’s shoulder, looking back at them. “Are you two okay?”

“I’m alright,” says Nell. It looks like she’s hit her cheek on the window, a reddening patch forming on the side of her face that is sure to morph into a spectacular bruise. She appears otherwise unharmed. “Eric?”

Realizing all focus in the car is now on him, Eric scrapes enough wherewithal together to take inventory of himself and answer the question. Other than the resonating pain in his ankle and a dull throb gripping his head, he seems to be okay. 

“I think I’m alright too,” he says cautiously. “Messed up my ankle a little, I think it got caught under Sam’s seat, but other than that I’m good. You guys?” This last part is directed to the front of the car.

“We’re fine,” G answers, and, not trusting his word on this whatsoever, Eric peers at the two of them in the dull glow of the softly pulsing dome light.

Sam is pulling at his locked seatbelt with a grimace and G is bleeding from a cut on his temple. Neither of them are seriously injured though, at least not visibly, and Eric finds himself struck suddenly breathless by how  _ lucky _ they had been. 

“What just  _ happened _ ?” 

“We just got ran off the road,” G says, kicking at his door until it springs open, bouncing on the hinges. The car sits at an angle on the sloped hillside, tilted downwards at the nose and Eric’s side. “We’ve gotta get out of here, they could be right behind us.”

The process of forcing open enough doors for the remaining three occupants of the car is an anxiety filled two minutes of banging and near-freaking out, until the crowded banks of trees on either side have swallowed the four of them completely. Sam looks around, assessing the situation, while G and Nell carefully deposit Eric by a tree.

“You two stay put,” G orders. “We’re going to go see if we can find where the other car ended up and put a stop to this before it gets ugly, I think it went down somewhere behind us.” 

Before Nell knows what’s going on, G and Sam have disappeared into the trees, and she is left with an injured Eric, a cellphone without a signal, and no idea what she’s supposed to do now. So, for lack of a better idea, she sits down on the ground next to Eric, and watches carefully around them, senses on high alert for any sign that the people chasing them are approaching. Time seems to slow to a crawl here in the woods, and for what feels like a very long period of it, she hears nothing. 

“Do you ever think about what you’d be doing if you weren’t here?” Eric asks, eyes meeting Nell’s in the gloom of the forest. He can just barely make out the expression on her face but he can tell she’s confused by his question. Now of all times does not seem like the appropriate moment to discuss the path not taken, and she can’t figure out how it was he managed to make that cognitive leap.

“Sometimes,” she answers, for lack of anything more constructive to do. “You know I’ve been scouted by a couple places, think-tanks, that kind of thing. I wonder what it would be like, working for them. Dealing with creating stuff rather than…” Nell trails off, waving her hand vaguely as if to indicate their current situation. Eric huffs a light laugh, leaning back against the tree behind him.

“I never do,” he says. “This is it for me. I have no idea what I would be doing or where I would be if I wasn’t here.” Looking around, fingers curling slightly in the damp leaves, Eric takes a couple of measured breaths, trying to focus on something other than their predicament or the pain radiating from his ankle. “Most of the time, I don’t  _ want _ to think about it. I like it here.” He frowns, remembering where exactly  _ here _ is. “There. I like it there. In ops.”

Grasping at another straw to keep him awake and them both alert and talking, Nell seizes upon the topic as soon as it occurs to her.

“Do you ever think about leaving ops?”

“You mean for the field?” There’s so much incredulousness in his voice it’s like Eric thinks Nell has asked him if he ever considered leaving NCIS for a career as a circus clown. “No way.” 

Eric takes a second to let his surroundings re-dominate his awareness. All his life he’d thought California was the most beautiful place on Earth, nowhere else was even close to it. Now, though, his surroundings just feel ominous and threatening, and thinking about the expansive state stretching out around them, farther than his mind can really comprehend, just makes him feel small and insignificant. California had never felt foreign or wild to him. Not until now. 

“I couldn’t do what Sam and G do, what Kensi and Deeks do,” Eric says, expanding on his answer and killing the awful silence he feels pressing down on his shoulders like bags of sand. He looks over at Nell, who has always had a bravery and determination about her that Eric has never been able to understand. “I couldn’t do what you want to do.”

“I just think there’s more to life than sitting behind a computer screen, watching it all happen.” Seeming to realize what kind of implication that carries, Nell winces and looks at him apologetically. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just mean that  _ I _ want more out of life, this job, than having to sit back and listen to people in the field putting their lives on the line and not being able to do anything to help them in the moment. Don’t get me wrong, what you do, what we do, it’s vitally important but…”

“But you get restless,” Eric finishes, and she smiles, relieved he knows what she’s getting at. 

“I get restless.” Shifting on the patch of dirt she’s claimed for herself, Nell peers out as far into the shadows between the trees as she can. “Speaking of restless, where do you suppose G and Sam are?”

Eric shrugs. His eyes are closed, and if it weren’t for the way he shifts uncomfortably every few moments, prodding at his ankle like that’ll make it better, Nell might’ve been afraid he’s passed out. Poke at her resolve just to make sure it’s still holding together

Laughing faintly, Eric coughs and then looks up at Nell. “You know what’s funny?” he asks in a hoarse voice.

“What?” Nell asks, clearly humoring him.

“The Mission Impossible theme. ‘S still stuck in my head.” He hums a few bars of it and laughs again before breaking into more coughing. Judging by the look on Nell’s face, she’s sailed right past mildly concerned and hit full-blown worry.

Deciding that waiting for Sam and G to just reappear through the trees is not a strategy that’s helping anyone, Nell gets up. She dusts herself off carefully, grimacing at the damp patches on her clothing courtesy of the mossy ground, and takes stock of the situation. 

They’re alone in the woods, which by itself is bad enough. To make matters exponentially worse, somewhere else in those same woods is a small but dedicated group of people actively trying to hunt them down and kill them. Adding injury to insult, Eric is pretty well laid up with a badly twisted ankle and what Nell assumes is a moderate concussion. Just to top it all off, neither of them are armed, unless you count a two inch Swiss Army knife in Nell’s cardigan pocket, and their only backup is somewhere else in the forest with no cell phone service. 

“Okay,” Nell says to herself quietly, folding her arms and turning in a slow circle. No patch of woods around them looks any different from the rest, and for the life of her she can’t remember what direction Sam and G had gone in when they left. “Okay, Jones, think.” There had to be something more she could do than just sit around waiting for either their friends or their enemies to happen upon them.

Reaching into her pocket, Nell takes out the Swiss Army knife. She doesn’t think it will be of any use if the people from the blue sedan show up, but it makes her feel better to hold it in her hand, like she’s not completely defenseless out here. She can’t count on Sam and G getting to them before the other group does. They’ll have to find their way out of this on their own. The way she sees it, her best bet to get them out of here safely is to find the highway again. Which, Nell thinks as she looks around, will be more complicated than it sounds.

“Eric,” she says, turning to her injured companion. He responds immediately, looking over at her with only a vague sense of haziness in his face, and she counts that among blessings and decides he seems lucid enough for her to explain her plan. “Here’s what we’re gonna do, are you paying attention?” Eric nods. “Okay good. We’re not too far away from where the car ended up, and I’m sure there’s a pretty good first aid kit in it somewhere.” They hadn’t had time before, too worried about where the people who ran them off the road might be, to make use of it, and Nell can only hope Sam and G haven’t returned to retrieve it in the meantime. “I’ll go and get it, and bring it back here, and we’ll see if we can get you up and walking. Then we’ll head towards the highway.”

Eric nods again, and looks like he’s hanging onto Nell’s every word. It makes her a little nervous, the complete trust in his face. She hopes, just a little bit, that it’s the probable concussion, because the weight of how much faith he has in her is just a little heavier than what she wants to carry right now. Not with everything else going on around them.

“Alright,” Nell says, voice sounding louder than she’d meant it to in the sudden silence, or as close to silence as it gets in the middle of the forest. She takes a deep breath, touches Eric’s shoulder once, and takes off into the trees. 

Despite how afraid Nell is that a bad guy with a gun will be lurking around every corner, the trip from Eric to the site of the crash and back again is uneventful. She jumps at every sound, even the twigs crackling under her own shoes. By the time she drops back down onto the leaves next to Eric, Nell is pretty sure she’s just shaved a couple years off her lifespan through sheer anxiety.

“Here,” she says, cracking open the first aid kit and taking stock of what they have available to them. “This should do it.”

The makeshift splint Nell rigs out of sturdy sticks and ace bandages is a setup that would have made her Girl Scout troupe leader proud. It takes the leverage of both of Nell’s hands and the tree beside her, but they manage to get Eric to his feet. It’s slow going back towards the highway, and in the end they group back up with Sam and G before they reach the road. 

A patch of dried leaves crackle under Eric as he stumbles slightly, Nell catching his arm and hauling wildly to keep him on his feet, right as she looks up to see the barrel of a gun pointed at her. Her heart stops in her chest and just as she’s thinking  _ ‘there’s so much I never got to do’ _ , the weapon lowers and she registers who’s standing behind it.

“Nell?” G asks incredulously, gun now hanging at his side. “What are you two doing? I thought I told you to stay put?”

“Well that didn’t seem like a great option after a while,” Nell explains, feeling a little embarrassed over how she’d reacted to turning the corner and facing the gun and covering it with an indignant expression. 

“She has a point,” Sam says, raising an eyebrow at his partner. “We did take a while. We didn’t find anything.” The last sentence is addressed towards Nell and Eric, the latter of whom’s face twists in a grimace even deeper than before. 

“Nothing? So where’d they  _ go _ ?” 

“Our theory is they stayed up on the road, waiting for us there, if the crash didn’t kill us.” Sam explains the new plan, which is to head back to a spot they found where reception broke through the mountains and allowed them to reach Kensi and Marty back at headquarters.

“How’re they holding up,” Nell asks, wincing at the idea of somebody other than Eric and herself running ops. 

“They’re doing fine,” G answers, shooting a slight smile at Sam. “Deeks knows his way around a computer and Kensi used to help out in ops a lot before you got hired on. They know what they’re doing, and they’re sending people from the closest police department to come and get us.”

It’s almost funny, how boring the wait is. Eric resorts back at one point to playing I Spy again, and he’s fairly sure the concussion is the only reason anyone goes along with it. It’s hard to tell how much time passes before the California State Trooper reaches them, flashlight beam cutting swaths across the gloom of dusk air in the forest. Two of them help Eric up the incline to the highway, and while G and Sam confer with the local LEOs standing by the squad cars parked across the stretch of highway where they had arrested the people who’d run them off the road, Eric and Nell stand in borrowed jackets, watching everything with an almost surreal detachment.

If Eric had ever needed confirmation that he should stay in ops for good, that he just wasn’t cut out for field work, this was it. Thinking about ops, and about roads not traveled, about restlessness and belonging, Eric nudges Nell with his elbow, getting her attention.

“Hey,” he says, and she looks back at him, lights from the nearby police car flashing across her face in blue red blue, throwing her features into dramatic shadow.

“Yeah?” 

“For what it’s worth, I think you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”


End file.
